Court Orders UK Internet Providers To Block Pirate Bay

File-sharing in the United Kingdom just got a little bit more difficult, as the nation’s High Court has ordered the country’s largest internet providers to completely block access to BitTorrent site The Pirate Bay.

Proponents of the ban had argued that the site, where users have posted more than a few links to let users download copyrighted items, was hurting the UK economy by allowing people to get copies of movies and music without paying for them.

Last November, the British Phonographic Industry has asked ISPs to voluntarily block access to The Pirate Bay, but some, like Virgin Media, had said it wouldn’t do so unless a court ordered it to.

Well, now that the order has come down, Virgin is responding accordingly. However, it tells the BBC that bans aren’t necessarily the solution, and that Virgin “strongly believes that changing consumer behaviour to tackle copyright infringement also needs compelling legal alternatives, such as our agreement with Spotify, to give consumers access to great content at the right price.”

The leader of the The Pirate Party UK, a related political movement that backs copyright reform, tells the BBC that blocking access to BitTorrents will “not put any extra pennies into the pockets of artists… The truth is that we are on a slippery slope towards internet censorship here in the United Kingdom.”

The executive director of the Open Rights Group says the High Court ruling will “fuel calls for further, wider and even more drastic calls for internet censorship of many kinds, from pornography to extremism… Internet censorship is growing in scope and becoming easier. Yet it never has the effect desired. It simply turns criminals into heroes.”

Which means that you’ll still get your stuff, but that doesn’t mean everyone who torrents will. I know enough to know how to torrent, but I can’t be bothered to, say, switch to OpenDNS. Cost/value isn’t there at that point.

Its not futile. Yes, you, me and many of the commentators here know many other ways to pirate if we wanted to, the average Joe doesnt. Id say half the users of TPB in the UK wouldnt have a clue how to change to a different DNS or even know what a proxy server is, let alone how to use one. Many people are either too stupid or scared to know how to do something differently. Its why there are still people out there using AOL for an ISP or Kazaa to steal music or Myspace for social networking.

Secondly there is very little reason to access TPB unless youre pirating content (Hell its even in the name of the site) which is most definitely copyright infringement. Also I dont want to hear the age old lame excuse about how it has legitimate uses such as downloading Linux distros. Less than 1% of the users of TPB are there for anything other than copyrighted material

Time and format shifting are both still illegal in the UK – there was a copyright consultation which ended a month or two ago about adding such a provision. But they’re illegal still.

There ARE legitimate uses. Dan Bull is using it to get in the charts, I think he’s at number 9 in the UK charts right now.
I used it when we launched our book in January, shifted over 13k copies of it in digital format (available for free at http://www.nosafeharbor.com) and enough paperback copies on amazon to get in the top 5000 for a while (not bad since I didn’t do much publicity)

Amusingly, I have some torrents on TPB, which are audio recordings of panels about this sort of thing (it’s CC licensed)